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This study examines how dispositional resistance to change (DRTC) – a change-specific personality trait – affects the expatriation willingness of Japanese employees in multinational corporations (MNCs) headquartered in Japan. We theorize that DRTC affects expatriation willingness through two situationally relevant mediators (motivational cultural intelligence (CQ) and foreign language anxiety) to discover ways in which organizations can change their employees’ attitudes for them to be willing to expatriate.

We tested mediation hypotheses using a two-wave survey of 693 Japanese MNC employees in various industries. Data were analyzed with structural equation modeling using Mplus 8.

The results indicate that motivational CQ and foreign language anxiety fully mediate the negative relationship between DRTC and willingness to expatriate.

The current study offers insights into expatriation willingness by revealing that DRTC is a personality trait relevant to be studied in the expatriation context. Second, and more importantly, the study finds that motivational CQ and foreign language anxiety are crucial mechanisms through which DRTC influences expatriation willingness. This is important because the study reveals that MNCs can influence their employees’ career choices even if they cannot directly change their personality traits (i.e. DRTC).

The literature on job crafting has paid scant attention to the role of skill variety, one dimension of job characteristics, as a predictor of employee job crafting. By integrating regulatory focus and social exchange perspectives with job crafting literature, the authors investigate how skill variety promotes employee job crafting and the moderating roles of employee's promotion focus and procedural justice climate.

The authors conducted two questionnaire surveys, one with a sample of 205 employees from a variety of organizations in China, and the other one with a sample of 265 employees within 44 work groups at a state-owned enterprise in China, to examine the hypotheses.

Results suggest that a high level of skill variety within a job promotes employee job crafting, that such an effect is stronger when the employee's promotion focus is high rather than low, and that procedural justice climate mitigates the negative influence of a low level of promotion focus.

The authors' findings suggest that both self-regulatory and social exchange mechanisms play a critical role in promoting employee job crafting when individuals are engaged in jobs that entail a high level of skill variety.

Based on the international human resource management perspective, this paper aims to explore and explain the human resource (HR) practices of Japanese multinational companies (MNCs) operating in India.

This paper applies a qualitative methodology. The study is based on 17 semi-structured interviews that were conducted within the subsidiaries of 10 Japanese MNCs in India.

The respective HR practices are differently influenced by cultural and institutional factors. Cultural similarity, unique social context and the evolving labor market shape the HR practices of Japanese MNCs in the Indian context.

The generalizability of findings might be limited because of the nature of methodology. Future research could collect additional qualitative data and conduct quantitative studies to test the findings of this research.

A unique combination of HR practices could be formed by addressing the changes in the local institutional environment and retaining the core philosophy of the parent company.

This research adds value to the transfer-adaptation dichotomy by presenting how institutional and cultural factors differently influence the transfer of respective HR practices.

The purpose of this paper is to develop an additional perspective on when and why intrinsic motivation predicts employee engagement by presenting a contextual boundary of psychological detachment in relation to the relationship between intrinsic motivation, employee creativity and employee engagement of workers.

Data were collected from 288 full-time Japanese workers using an online survey. The study used a bootstrap method (Preacher and Hayes, 2008) to test mediation, and a Hayes method (2013) to test moderation and a first-stage moderated mediation model.

Employee creativity mediated the relationship between intrinsic motivation and employee engagement, and the relationship between intrinsic motivation and creativity was moderated by psychological detachment. Additionally, the indirect effect of intrinsic motivation on employee engagement via creativity was moderated by psychological detachment.

The cross-sectional design may have limited the empirical inferences; however, the proposed model was based on robust theoretical contentions, and the study included an unrelated “marker variable” (neuroticism) as an effective means of identifying common method variance (CMV), thus mitigating the limitation of the design.

This study has shown that intrinsically motivated employees who practice psychological detachment from work achieve higher creativity and stronger employee engagement.

Based on the unconscious thought theory (UTT), job demand resource theory (JD-R), recovery processes (i.e. effort-recovery model) and self-determination theory (SDT), this paper adds to the literature by demonstrating the mediating and moderating mechanisms driving intrinsic motivation and employee engagement relationship.

This study aims to understand how female globally mobile employees (GMEs), a group that is gaining a stronger presence in global work, exert their career agency within the context of structural constraints.

Using theoretical perspectives of career-agency theory and person-environment fit as frames of reference, this study collected 113 blog posts written by 19 female GMEs and conducted semi-structured interviews with 11 female GMEs who are currently living and working in Japan.

This study found that the informants exercised career agency as a response to challenges related to foreignness and gender. Through career-related agentic behaviors, the informants strove to increase their fit with their environments while interacting with different aspects of structural constraints. This study also found that people in different stages of global mobility exhibited different mindsets toward their foreignness, consequently influencing their career agency.

This study highlights the dynamic interaction between structural constraints and the agency of female GMEs, advancing the understanding of career agency in women’s global work. In addition, it recognizes the presence of expatriate residents as a distinct subgroup within the GME population, shedding light on the evolving ambiguous boundaries between self-initiated expatriates and other talent categories.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate women managers’ work values in the Chinese sociocultural context and to explain how these work values affect their career success. This paper also explores how social and cultural factors affect Chinese women’s work value formation process.

Using a grounded theory approach, the authors collected and analyzed data through in-depth interviews with 12 women managers in the banking industry in northeast China.

The analysis identified eight dimensions of Chinese women’s work values and how they affect women’s career success in the Chinese context. The authors also found that although both social and cultural factors affect women’s work values, the effect of traditional Chinese culture is still profound.

The study extends the literature on Chinese women’s work values and provides a better understanding of traditional Chinese culture’s effect on contemporary Chinese women, particularly in developing cities.

The research effort on entrepreneurship education has been mainly for the higher education settings and on the individual level of analysis. On the contrary, this research urges scholars to expedite attention to the secondary education settings, especially in the emerging economies in Asia and Africa. This paper aims to reveal the existing landscape of literature development on the topic and promote ecological approaches of constructing entrepreneurship education programs in schools. It advocates the “incubator” role of schools for students and the necessity of establishing socially embedded entrepreneurship education as the playground for future entrepreneurs.

This study followed the systematic literature review as its research design. It obtained 1,555 publications from six academic databases and 60 more publications from expert consulting and backward snowballing technique. Data screening resulted in a total of 101 relevant publications with the upper secondary education as their research context. The qualitative integrative synthesis method was then applied to integrate research evidence to the five circles of systems according to Urie Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory.

This study contributes to the entrepreneurship education and youth career development literature, especially in the developing countries. Results discovered that entrepreneurship education programs, when interacting with ecological systems, resulted in training success. The most frequently studied systems were microsystems; here, there was a dominant focus on program-level reporting and analyzing. There was less focus on other systems such as mesosystems, exosystems or macrosystems. Moreover, only one study was associated with chronosystems, suggesting a significant research gap regarding the longitudinal studies. However, this review validated the different approaches to delivering entrepreneurship education in emerging and developed economies.

One limitation of this research lies in the methodology. The inclusion criteria limited the studies to the context of upper secondary education and excluded those of secondary education in general. The sampling method limited the power of this research to analyze and discuss policy-level studies because policies most likely embrace the whole secondary education level as its target. Another limitation is associated with the lack of experimental studies in assessing the comparative advantages of following the ecological approach when constructing entrepreneurship education. It, therefore, remains an undiscussed matter within this study regarding whether following the ecological approach means empirically a better educational choice or not.

This study discusses the implications for policymakers, especially in emerging economies, and suggests that awareness, attention and funding are needed to empower youth entrepreneurship education from an ecological systems view.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is one of few studies that use the ecological systems theory in the context of entrepreneurship education with the purpose of focusing on environment-level analysis instead of individual-level analysis. Through the systematic literature review, this study proposes an ecological approach to comprehend, guide, evaluate and improve the design and implementation of entrepreneurship education programs in schools based on well-articulated research evidence. The research can inform both researchers and educators by offering a holistic perspective to observe and evaluate entrepreneurship education programs and their levels of social connectedness.

While mentoring plays an important role in Japanese working places, formal mentoring programs have only recently been introduced. This chapter provides an overview of the development of mentoring in Japan and presents a conceptual model to comprehend mentoring in Japan and beyond. The chapter begins with the illustration of how the characteristics of Japanese organizations and Japanese-style human resource management (HRM) promoted the naturally occurring informal mentoring in the Japanese workplace in early years. In response to the stagnating economy and declining demographics during the last few decades, many Japanese firms adopted Western-style HRM practices, including formal mentoring programs. We provide statistical data to demonstrate the widespread adoption of formal mentoring programs in recent years. We then report the results of the systematic review of the academic literature on mentoring in Japan, suggesting that research on mentoring in Japan is still in the early stage. Based on the historical overview, current data and the systematic review of the academic literature, we develop a conceptual model of how the socio-cultural and economic context as well as organizational characteristics influence the adoption of Japanese-style naturally occurring informal mentoring and/or Western-style formal mentoring practices. We conclude this chapter with practical and theoretical implications.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a contingency perspective that describes the relative importance of person‐job (PJ) fit and person‐organization (PO) fit as selection criteria for hiring various types of employees.

Drawing on the theories of psychological contracts, human capital and cosmopolitan‐local perspective, propositions are developed regarding the relative importance of PJ fit and PO fit in specific hiring situations.

The propositions developed in this paper suggest that PJ fit will be more important than PO fit when organizations hire employees to form transactional psychological contracts, to obtain general human capital, and/or who are categorized as cosmopolitans. On the other hand, it is suggested that PO fit will be more important than PJ fit when organizations hire employees to form relational psychological contracts, to develop firm‐specific human capital, and/or who are likely to become locals.

Further empirical and theoretical work should be conducted to elaborate the contingency perspective. A more comprehensive contingency theory of person‐environment (PE) fit could include other types of PE fit, other contingency variables, and cover a wider range of management practices.

Organizations should be aware of the trade‐off between PJ fit and PO fit in the selection process, and carefully examine what type of employees they will hire in order to determine the relative weights of PJ fit and PO fit as selection criteria.

This paper is the first attempt to consider the different types of employees and employment relationships that determine the relative importance of PJ fit and PO fit in selecting employees. It is done through incorporating different theoretical perspectives.

This paper aims to explore the importance of the role of national business systems (NBS) in shaping human resource management (HRM) and organisational behaviour (OB) practices in the context of Asian countries. To this end, this paper presents a comparative overview of different NBS in selected Asian countries and how these variously impact HRM and OB at two levels and contexts, i.e. within and cross-national.

The paper presents a topical review of the literature to unravel the complexity and challenges associated with studying this rich and complex area.

The findings suggest there is significant complexity in studying the impact of NBS on HRM and OB at a holistic and multi-level unit of analysis. The multiplicity of factors and levels of analysis, even at a level of within country analysis, highlights the sophisticated, in-depth and detailed nature of scholarship needed to unbundle and get a fuller understanding of this topic.

Although recent research presents a within and cross-national analysis of NBS and its impact on HRM and OB practices from diverse Asian countries such as India, Japan, Indonesia and Malaysia, recent research offers only a focused analysis of few targeted HRM and OB practices, rather than a collective or a bundle of HRM practices.

The contributions point to several practical implications for HR managers as well as managers from other fields, covering several national and cross-national comparisons.

This paper offers a substantial contribution in the understanding of how various HRM and OB practices are embedded in a nation’s business system and through a variety of historical and cultural influences.